A Tale of Two Books: Dark Times in the City of Light

The evening of November 13, 2015, catching up on some end-of-the-week email connected to the study-in-Paris program under my direction, while trying to follow out of the corner of one eye a match amical between the French and German national soccer teams at the Stade de France to the north of Paris, I distinctly heard an explosion around 9:20 p.m. during the TF1 broadcast, with two others following during the first half of play. The detonation of loud fireworks outside of the stadium, perhaps? No one seemed to know, as the players played on and the television announcers continued to broadcast. Then the French scored an impressive go-ahead goal toward the end of the first half. It was odd that the French President, François Hollande and his entourage would have chosen to leave earlier while les Bleus were playing well. But they had already learned the nature of the three explosions as well as what others would later know, as that terrible November night of Friday the 13th was playing out on other terrains in Paris’s young and hip 11th arrondissement. My wife and I had discussed going to a favorite Asian restaurant in that very district, but fatigue held us captive—and ultimately safe—in our Left Bank apartment that evening.

Soon after the go-ahead goal I received a disturbing call from the director of our partnering institute in Paris. There was news of an urban shoot-out near the Bastille area. The details were not yet clear, but I immediately went to work trying to track down my Sewanee “Fall Semester in Paris” students via cell phone and with some Facebook help from a student in our group. By 11:00 p.m. all were accounted for but one; and when I received a text message from that student some 45 minutes later I breathed an enormous sigh of relief and began immediately contacting parents and administrators stateside with the reassuring news. Meanwhile as I madly typed away on my laptop, two books were still on the desk, just to the right of my newly established “central control” space where I would pretty much live over the next few days—two very different books that I had been reading earlier that fateful day.

Book I

I found myself reading yet another time, for teaching purposes, this favorite among so many American “Parisophiles” wanting to re-create imaginatively the Lost Generation’s literary and artistic exile in the City of Light during the 1920s. My juniors abroad had requested that the book be added to our syllabus down the stretch of our fall term together in Paris so that they might have sufficient time to know the city well enough to appreciate many of the geographical references. Using our semestral milieu as a cultural laboratory for my seminar, we had been tying a series of French literary texts to the sites being described or to places where the works were penned—and in so doing, already captivating writings by La Fontaine, Balzac, Hugo, Nerval, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Proust, and Apollinaire came all the more alive for my students, with plays by Molière and Marivaux also studied and then seen on Parisian stages. A persuasive English major in the group argued that there were multiple guidebooks available just on Hemingway’s Paris and what a shame it would be not to read his tale and to visit his fellow expatriates’ streets and shrines while living and studying in the same city. Though irrevocably peeved over Hemingway’s ultimate treatment of first wife, Hadley, and of other “friends” mentioned in the memoir—his...